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Article 11
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Rutgers University
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Volume 17 Issue 1 (March 2015) Article 11
Weijie Song,
"Positions of Sinophone Representation in Jin's (金庸
金庸)
金庸 Chivalric Topography"
<http://docs.lib.purdue.edu/clcweb/vol17/iss1/11>
Contents of CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture 17.1 (2015)
Thematic Issue The Study of Chinese Literature in the Anglophone World. Ed. Shunqing Cao
<http://docs.lib.purdue.edu/clcweb/vol17/iss1/>
Abstract: In his article "Positions of Sinophone Representation in Jin's (金庸) Chivalric Topography"
Weijie Song examines Yong Jin's post-1949 Hong Kong chivalric imagination of imperial Beijing and
beyond during the Ming-Qing Dynastic transition and the dialects of inclusive exclusion and exclusive
inclusion. In Cold War Hong Kong, Jin charted a wide range of chivalric activities: intruding into the
political center embodied by the Forbidden City (the "Great Within") and fleeing to peripheral regions
such as Xinjiang's Islamic community, the overseas kingdom in Brunei in Southeast Asia, and an unknown place somewhere inside Yangzhou. Song argues that Jin's literary topography suggests a frustrated yet flexible identity and a supplementary yet self-sufficient "republic of letters" in his remapping
of China's past for the possible positions of contemporary Sinophone representations.
Weijie Song, "Positions of Sinophone Representation in Jin's (金庸) Chivalric Topography "
CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture 17.1 (2015): <http://docs.lib.purdue.edu/clcweb/vol17/iss1/11>
Thematic Issue The Study of Chinese Literature in the Anglophone World. Ed. Shunqing Cao
page 2 of 8
Weijie SONG
Positions of Sinophone Representation in Jin's (金庸
金庸)
金庸 Chivalric Topography
As one of the most important genres of modern Chinese literature and popular culture, martial arts
fiction arouses great passion and ongoing controversy in global Chinese academic and non-academic
communities and still awaits insightful and unbiased approaches. Yong Jin (金庸 1924-) has been the
most popular and acclaimed writer of martial arts fiction since the 1950s. Regarded as "全世界華人的共
同語言" (common language of global Chinese communities), Jin's fifteen martial arts novels, originally
serialized in newspapers in 1950s-1970s, later rewritten and compiled in thirty-six volumes in 1970s
and 1980s, and then rewritten again in the 2000s, have been published continually as best sellers, included gradually into literary anthologies and textbooks, and adapted for commercial and experimental films, television series, stage performances, comic books, animations, video games, and theme
parks. Circulated in the P.R. of China, Hong Kong, Taiwan, Southeast Asia, and Chinese communities
all over the world, Jin's martial arts novels have sustained a long-lasting and border-crossing popularity and inspired a booming industry of "Jinology" in the Sinophone (Chinese-speaking and Chineselanguage) world.
In the study at hand I discuss Jin's martial arts novels 書劍恩仇錄 (The Book and the Sword;
serialized in 1955-1956, revised in 1975, newly revised in 2002), 碧血劍 (The Sword Stained with Royal Blood; serialized in 1956-1957, revised in 1975, newly revised in 2004), and 鹿鼎記 (The Deer and
the Cauldron; serialized in 1969-1972, revised in 1981, newly revised in 2006). Written during the
Cold War, Jin employed the narrative strategies of inclusion and exclusion to traverse the real and the
imagined, supplementary and subversive histories, and the imperial center and its peripheries. Set
against the backdrop of the Ming-Qing dynastic transformation, Jin charted the imagined chivalric activities within the imperial capital, in particular the Forbidden City (the "Great Within") in relation to
other locations including the Gobi Desert in the Xinjiang Uygur region, Manchuria, the Russian Empire,
the Jiangnan region, Taiwan, and islands in the southern seas (Brunei in Southeast Asia). Beijing as
the imperial capital and political center is defined by its geopolitical and geopoetic relationships with
other discursive and geographic locations such as 中原 (Central Plains), 江南 (the Jiangnan region), its
borderlands, and the vast seas. The martial arts emplotment of the "Great Within" discloses Jin's ambitious and ambivalent literary maps, or literary geography, of Qing Empire and Dynastic History. Imperial Beijing, in particular "the Great Within," becomes a platform of desolation and recollection, a revisited space of anxiety and desire, and an opening to articulate the frustrated and fluid subjectivities
in Jin's Cold War martial arts imagination.
Born in 1924 in Haining (Zhejiang Province), Yong Jin (查良鏞, also known as Louis Cha Leung
Yung and Louis Cha) came to Hong Kong in 1948 as an international telex editor for the newspaper 大
公報 (Ta Kung Pao, formerly L'Impartial). In 1950 he traveled to Beijing to be interviewed by the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of the People's Republic, but his dream of becoming a diplomat was shattered
that year when his father was labeled a counterrevolutionary landlord and executed. In 1952 he
moved to 新晚報 (Xin wanbao, The New Evening Post), and invited by his friend and colleague 梁羽生
(Yusheng Liang, pen name of 陳文統 Wentong Chen, 1924-2009), he used his pen name to start his literary career with serialized chivalric fiction in 1955. In her study of Cold War Hong Kong culture,
Xiaojue Wang examines the antagonistic yet mutually dependent relationship between the cultural left
and right and points out that the rise of the New School martial arts fiction resulted directly from the
promotion of the genre by the leading leftist newspaper The New Evening Post. During the heydays of
the Cold War when the martial arts genre was censored in both the Communist and the Nationalist regimes, Hong Kong became the unexpected birthplace of this new genre of fiction. New School martial
arts narrative not only bespeaks the intricate relationship between literature and politics, but attests
to the special geopolitical and geopoetic conjunctions in which Jin's literary imaginations of Beijing are
imbedded. Moreover, in 1949 and after, with the communist party's takeover of the Mainland and the
Kuomintang's retreat to Taiwan, millions of people were forced to (e)migrate and were uprooted from
their hometowns. For mainlanders who emigrated to Sinophone regions outside of the newly established communist China in 1949, literary accounts of Beijing had to counter the memories of recent
historical experiences with a traumatic narrative. The experiences of a severed nation were so power-
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CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture 17.1 (2015): <http://docs.lib.purdue.edu/clcweb/vol17/iss1/11>
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ful and destructive that diaspora writers had to rethink, restructure, and reframe their memories—
individual and national, urban, and cultural—in order to produce their narratives.
In her work on the Holocaust, memory, and family photographs, Marianne Hirsch coined the term
"postmemory" to elucidate the relationship between the second generation and the traumatic experiences which took place before their birth yet were transmitted to them. She regards postmemory "as
a structure of inter- and trans-generational transmission of traumatic knowledge and experience. It is
a consequence of traumatic recall but (unlike posttraumatic stress disorder) at a generational remove"
(106). The Beijing narratives by an emigré writer like Jin are not about transmitted memory, inherited
memory, or "absent memory" (Fine 41-57) of the generation after. Here, it is useful to recall Hirsch's
clarification of multiple layers of connotations of the "post" in "postmemory." Hirsch posits that "post"
points to both a temporal delay and a location in the aftermath, both a critical distance from and a
troubling interrelation with the original memory. I regard these emigré Beijing recollections as an urban postmemory, with all the layers of meanings that "post" carries. More important, these stories
rarely address the 1949 trauma directly. Instead, they deal with these experiences vicariously and
displace them with seemingly irrelevant yet potentially connected and sometimes displaced/disguised
stories. Jin's martial arts Beijing imagines an imperial capital of loyalty, (in)justice, and dynastic
changes and exiles in the Ming and Qing transition, and therefore provides an exemplary postmemory
with retold premodern history and fantasy. As individual, communal, and national memories were projected onto, reframed, and displaced by other aspects of life or other historical times, as they were restructured, dislocated, and emanated from national peripheries, they turned into what I call
postmemories, and Beijing into a displaced city.
Serialized in The New Evening Post from 8 February 1955 to 5 September 1956, The Book and the
Sword was an instant success. It depicts the quest of the secret society, 紅花會 (Red Flower Society),
in alliance with an Islamic tribe in northwestern China to overthrow the Manchu Qing dynasty and restore Han Chinese rule. 陳家洛 (Jialuo Chen), helmsman of the Red Flower Society, becomes involved
in a love triangle with two Islamic sisters. Chen struggles between the anti-Manchu mission and his
personal romantic liaisons. Later Chen learns that the Emperor Qianlong (乾隆 1711-1799) is not a
Manchu, but a Han Chinese; even more shockingly, Qianlong is actually his older brother, who was
switched at birth with Emperor Yongzheng's (雍正 1678-1735) daughter. Chen and his companions
take Qianlong hostage to persuade him to acknowledge his ethnicity and assist the anti-Manchu cause.
Qianlong is forced to take an oath of alliance, which he later renounces. After a second defeat by the
Red Flower Society, Qianlong agrees to a truce. Chen and his friends retreat to the Islamic western
regions of the Qing Empire. Jin's debut established the basic features of his chivalric geographic map
of the Chinese Empire. In The Book and the Sword, Beijing and the imperial frontier are mutually constructed and defined in ethnic, familial, political, and romantic terms.
Jin's second martial arts novel, Bixue jian (The Sword Stained with Royal Blood), was serialized in
香港商報 (Xianggang shangbao, Hong Kong Commercial Daily) from 1 January to 31 December 1956. It
is set at the time of the fall of the Ming dynasty in 1644 and centers on the adventures of 袁承志 (Yuan
Chengzhi), the fictional son of 袁崇煥 (Yuan Chonghuan 1584-1630), the famous Ming general who defeated Nurhaci and was later wronged and executed by the Emperor Chongzhen (崇禎 1611-1644). Tutored by the martial arts master 穆人清 (Mu Renqing), Yuan Chengzhi grows up an able martial artist
and joins forces with the rebel leader 李自成 (Li Zicheng 1606-1645) to overthrow the corrupt Ming regime and avenge his father. In his journey of adventure, he attempts to assassinate the ruler of the
Manchu invaders and later the Emperor Chongzhen, sabotages a battery of cannons supplied to the
Ming army by foreigners, and finances the rebellion with a treasure he discovers in Nanjing. The Ming
Empire collapses and falls to the Manchus, and Li Zicheng's army turns out to be equally corrupt and
brutal. Disappointed with the situation, Yuan Chengzhi leaves China and sails to Brunei with his lover
and friends. Traversing the boundaries between the Ming, the peasant rebellion force, and the Manchu
Qing, between Chinese territory, the West (represented by the Portuguese artillery), and the southern
isle, The Sword Stained with Royal Blood continues exploring and expanding the geopolitical imaginations unfolded around Beijing.
Hailed as his most important work, Jin's final book, the anti-martial arts novel The Deer and the
Cauldron was serialized in 明報 (Ming Pao) from 24 October 1969 to 23 September 1972. The illiterate
but sly and witty teenager 韋小寶 (Xiaobao Wei, "Trinket") was born to a prostitute in a Yangzhou
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brothel during the Qing Dynasty. He makes his way to Beijing and develops a close friendship with the
young Emperor 康熙 (Kangxi 1654-1722). The antihero Wei has a series of turbulent adventures involving court politics, the martial arts world, secret societies, the Lamaist section of the Wutai Mountains, the Koxinga (鄭成功 Zheng Chenggong 1624-1662) court in Taiwan, the satrap 吳三桂's (Wu
Sangui 1612-1678) ambitions in Yunnan, and the border negotiations with Russia leading to the Treaty of Nerchinsk of 1689. For his accomplishments Wei is rewarded with wealth and titles of nobility
and he also gains respect from anti-Manchu secret societies for eliminating tyrannical officials and defending China from foreign invaders. When his conflicting loyalties become too uncomfortable, Wei returns to Yangzhou and leads a reclusive life with his seven wives.
Stephen Soong describes The Deer and the Cauldron as "a roller-coaster of a novel, packed with
thrills, with fun, rage, humour, and abuse, written in a style that flows and flashes like quicksilver"
(Minford 1, xiii). While The Book and the Sword and The Sword Stained with Royal Blood map out a
dialectics between Han and non-Han Chinese, between the center and the periphery of the Chinese
Empire, Jin's final work complicates this imperial geography. Whereas Chen and Yuan often hesitate
and suffer from ethnic confrontations and conflicting notions of political, romantic, and cultural loyalty,
Wei, who is similarly placed at the front line of such contestations, is rarely concerned about these
ambiguities. Or, Wei's identity is defined by his adept yet arbitrary movement between ambivalent positions. Since his mother had Han, Manchu, Mongolian, Muslim, and even Tibetan clients when he was
conceived, Wei's ethnic identity remains a mystery. Jin goes to great lengths to depict Wei's mixed
and often distorted ethical values, historical memories, and cultural imaginations, which derived from
listening to the storytellers in the teahouses. Wei's misuses of idioms and allusions are common, but
he is unperturbed by such and his poor knowledge of idioms and his distortions of their meanings remind the reader of the hybrid coexistence and hierarchical use of English, Cantonese, and Chinese in
Hong Kong. Wei's lack of knowledge is symptomatic of the disorderly historical experience of colonized
people.
In his two letters to Jin in 1966 and 1970, Shih-hsiang Chen shared how he and his colleagues enjoyed reading Jin's novels and stated that Jin's martial arts novels "manifest the author's own genius,
and speak to the conditions of the age" (1977). I argue that Jin focuses intentionally on the social,
ethical, and cultural crises in the dynastic transitions from the Song to Yuan and Ming to Qing dynasties and explores a wide range of topics including the ethnic conflict between Han and non-Han peoples, the conceptualization of individual identity and collective memory under colonial rule, and the articulation of broad and narrow nationalisms. John Christopher Hamm notes that "gradually extricating
itself from the dynastic and territorial concerns that govern the early works," the vision of an
essentialized and celebratory Chinese cultural identity "locates itself within a timeless, mandala-like
mythic geography; simultaneously, it asserts the priority of individual emotional experience—
expressed above all in romantic relationships—over political and ethnic allegiances" (79). From the
perspective of Cold War ideology and identity politics, Petrus Liu states that Jin "develops a unique
theory of the subject," "stateless subjects," "in the beginning years of the Cold War when Mao's China
descends into a permanent arms economy" (108).
How to map out the imperial geography in ethnic, linguistic, political, and romantic terms constitutes the central focus of all three novels. With Beijing placed as the geographical, symbolic, and political center of the empire, Jin set out to chart its relations to other places, including its borderlands,
which in turn redefine Beijing's position. The making, assembling, uncovering, or possessing of maps
constitute crucial themes in the process of illustrating the geographic parameters. In The Sword
Stained with Royal Blood, seeing no hope in the Central Plains that have been taken over by the Manchu, Yuan leads his followers to an island in the South Seas. On his maritime expedition he follows a
map which the Portuguese captain he once defeated presents him. Yuan's sailing off to a southern island is reminiscent of both Li Jun's 李俊 island refuge in Siam 暹羅 in Ming loyalist 陳忱's (Chen Chen
1614-1665) 水滸後傳 (Sequel to the Water Margin) as well as 鄭和's (Zheng He 1371-1433) leading the
Ming treasure fleet to the western sea to explore new territories for the Ming Empire. There have been
many interpretations which associate Yuan's dislocation with the 1949 Kuomintang retreat to Taiwan.
Hamm observes that although the novel is set in contemporary social historical contexts, the significance of Yuan's departure for the island lies "less in any specific representation of contemporary politics than in its expression of the 'Central Plains Syndrome' and its mapping of the relationship between
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the discursive territory of the martial arts novel and that of life in contemporary Hong Kong" (66). The
cartography of imperial territory also plays a key role in The Deer and the Cauldron, as Wei gets involved in the border negotiations between the Qing and Russian empires and assembling the map to
locate the buried treasure that will help force the Manchu out of the Central Plains and restore Han
Chinese domination.
Just as the imperial borderlands need to be investigated and recharted, the center of the empire
defies a definite spatial or political mapping. In Jin's martial arts world, the Forbidden City is an intricate maze that can hardly be navigated even with the help of a map. In The Sword Stained with Royal
Blood, after the chivalric hero Yuan enters the Forbidden City, his sense of orientation attained from
the martial arts space of 江湖 (jianghu, rivers and lakes) is in vain and he gets lost. In his mission to
assassinate the emperor, Yuan finds himself trapped deep in the labyrinth of the Forbidden City. Rather than locating the Emperor Chongzhen in Qianqing Palace, he ends up in Ningshou Palace of the
Princess Changping. As a result of his disorientation, the chivalric endeavor to seek poetic justice for
common people takes an unexpected turn to the development of a romantic relationship between the
hero and the princess. In The Deer and the Cauldron, as Wei is forced to lead the way to the Forbidden City to help the swordsmen assassinate the Emperor Kangxi, he warns them that even if they
manage to enter the heavily guarded imperial palace, they will by no means find the exact location of
the emperor among the multitude of buildings. When asked to offer a map of the "Great Within," Wei
does not refuse:
This Trinket (Wei Xiaobao) proceeded to do, blinding them with another (but much longer) series of names of
buildings and compounds as he took them on a "guided tour" of the Forbidden City. After all, he couldn't see how it
could really do any harm. He started with the Meridian Gate, directly behind the Gate of Heavenly Peace, then led
them over the five-fold Bridge of Golden Water, and on through the three Great Halls—of Supreme Harmony, Middle Harmony, and Harmony Protected—then through the Gate of the Imperial Ancestors, and on to the Imperial
Kitchens (in his former identity as Laurel Goong-goong he had been attached to these kitchens); then through the
Palace of Heavenly Purity, and into the women's apartments, the Place of Female Repose and the Palace of Maternal Tranquility; thence into the Imperial Gardens; and northward to the Hall of Nurturing the Mind; and on, and on.
Lady Gui did her utmost to commit all of this to memory. (330; unless indicated otherwise, all translations are
mine)
The impenetrability of the imperial center and the difficulty of locating the sovereign do not present a mere spatial challenge for these knights-errant who are used to a different set of rules of navigation. Their disorientation occurs in affective, ethnic, and political terms. Following the noble codes of
chivalry, the swordsmen Gui couple strive to kill the Emperor Kangxi for his non-Han ethnic identity
and thus his lack of political legitimacy as Emperor for China proper. The Central Plains should be
ruled and governed by Han Chinese, whether by a benevolent emperor or not. Wei Xiaobao, however,
attempts to hinder the assassination plan for the sake of his friendship with Kangxi and his belief that
the emperor treats his people well. His protection of the emperor is based less on ethnic and political
than private, affective criteria. Further, the ambivalent mapping of a legitimate empire on the Central
Plains is represented in a compelling way in the episode of Yuan's plan to assassinate the Manchu ruler
皇太極 (Huang Taiji [Abahai] 1592-1643), fourth son of 努爾哈赤 (Nurhachi 1559-1626), before the
Manchu troops entered the Shanhai Pass and occupied the entire Central Plains. In chapter 13 of The
Sword Stained with Royal Blood, after Yuan breaks into Abahai's palace during the assassination mission, he eavesdrops on Abahai's conversations with his ministers and is deeply impressed by the latter's knowledge of Chinese language and history and capacity as a statesman. Abahai shows sincere
care for the livelihood of Han people and says, that "in a word, the reason that the southern court
gave rise to so many bandits is only because that the common people have no food. If we succeed in
overthrowing the Ming Empire, the first important matter will be to feed the common people" (The
Sword Stained 468). Hearing these words, Yuan, the son of an anti-Manchu general, "only felt that
every sentence was reasonable and totally forgot his mission to assassinate him" (The Sword Stained
469). At this moment of hesitation, for Yuan, who is committed to avenge his father's death or the
patriotic mission to impede the invasion of non-Han people, for the first time, is exposed to an alternative political legitimacy based on benevolent sovereignty instead of ethnic distinction.
Embedded in Jin's chivalric imaginations of Chinese imperial geography are not just his deep interest in Chinese history, but also his awareness of the geographical and discursive separation of Chi-
Weijie Song, "Positions of Sinophone Representation in Jin's (金庸) Chivalric Topography "
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nese terrains during the Cold War. How to come to terms with the division and boundaries in the British colony of Hong Kong? How to preserve a historical and cultural consciousness in the peripheral
Hong Kong without being subject to any dominant ideological restraints, Communist in Beijing or Nationalist in Taipei? Jin's martial arts stories complicate the ideological binary confrontation during the
Cold War time and I consider them in a Sinophone context. Jin's literary remapping of imperial Beijing
in a multilayered and decentralized fashion addresses and enriches what Shu-mei Shih calls "geopolitical situatedness, a place-based practice," and the Sinophone areas as places of cultural production
(717). Imperial Beijing is continously localized and situated in the image gallery and literary landscape
of colonial Hong Kong and the tale of two cities—visible Beijing and invisible Hong Kong—highlights
the intriguiling dialectic of absence and presence, or more precisely, "absent presence" and "present
absence" in Jin's martial arts fiction. Giorgio Agamben uses "exception" and "example" to inquire into
the coherent relation between "inclusive exclusion" and "exclusive inclusion": "Exception" functions as
an "inclusive exclusion" (including what is excluded), and "example" serves as an "exclusive inclusion"
(excluding what is included) (21-22). In this sense, Jin's Hong Kong Sinophone articulation and his
chivalric topography of imperial Beijing can also be situated in the categories of "example" and "exception" among manifold Sinophone articulations: imperial Beijing is an "example" or an "exclusive inclusion" because Beijing is included in Jin's chivalric geography but excluded from the British colony;
Hong Kong turns out to be an "exception" or an "inclusive exclusion" in that it is excluded from Jin's
Beijing narrative but included in his mechanism of Cold War remapping of the imperial capital. Jin's
position in Hong Kong, Chinese, and Sinophone literary history is yet another significant case of "inclusion" and "exclusion," "exception" and "example": he is incorporated into the literary history compiled by mainland Chinese scholars; his martial arts fiction is regarded as a model example of Hong
Kong and overseas literature, and even labeled as a canon of Chinese-language literature. But on the
other hand, Jin's literary praxis is also understood as an exception in terms of content, language, genre, and literary categorizations of popular and elite writings.
"Topography," according to J. Hillis Miller, "is the product of a triple figurative transference.
'Topography' originally meant the creation of a metaphorical equivalent in words of a landscape. Then,
by another transfer, it came to mean representation of a landscape according to the conventional
signs of some system of mapping. Finally, by a third transfer, the name of the map was carried over
to name what is mapped" (3-4). In defining topography, the key words include "lieu," "place," "landscape," "territory," "architecture," "geography," "mapping," "region," "realm," "area," "location," and
"dwelling." For Miller, topography is "the act of mapping" (4). I would argue that a literary mapping is
produced after a subjective and aesthetic journey, akin to the physical journey of a cartographer
charting new terrain. And if exhibition is "a vehicle for the display of objects or a space for telling a
story" (12), then mapping is done not only to chart literary spaces but also to create territories in
which meanings can be deciphered. Mapping is also romancing, exhibiting, criticizing, familiarizing and
defamiliarizing, adding enchantment or disenchantment to the image of this literary location. In this
sense, "literary topography" is also similar to "literary Geography," which, according to Franco Moretti,
refers to the study of "space in literature (the dominant is a fictional one); or it may indicate the study
of literature in space" (real historical space) (3). The two disciplines are disparate but also overlapping. Literary topography of modern Beijing indicates, therefore, a possibility, using Moretti's words,
"to be the bridge between the old and the new, forging a symbolic compromise between the indifferent world of modern knowledge, and the enchanted topography of magic storytelling" (72). When examining the literary travels and global imagination of Sinophone literature under the shadow of culturally dominant and geographically remote mainland and homeland, David Der-wei Wang borrows Ailing
Zhang's proposal, confession, or paradox of "include me out" to call attention to the complex entanglement between the genealogy of Sinophone writing and the geopolitical dissemination of mainland
Chinese literary tradition. He further redefines the Sinophone connection with mainland Chinese
literature as a possibility of "including China out" (Transboundary 91-93). I would go further and
argue that Jin's Hong Kong Sinophone chivalric remapping of imperial Beijing "includes Beijing out"
and "excludes Hong Kong in."
"Absent presence" and "present absence," "exclusive inclusion" and "inclusive exclusion," as well
as "including Beijing out" and "excluding Hong Kong in," present and display Jin's strategy of writing
and covers the topography of the Manchu imperial capital from his modern perspectives of ethnicity
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and race, Han and non-Han liaisons, as well as imperial, national, and colonial questions. Beijing is
absent geopolitically and far away from Hong Kong, yet appears as a significant literary place and it is
represented and dramatized as a core urban setting constantly violated by imagined intervention and
bodily transgression in Jin's three martial arts novels. Hong Kong is absent in Beijing narratives, yet
the colonial experiences in the British colony stimulate Jin to showcase the utopian impulse of paying
imagined face-to-face visits to the (Manchu) emperors in the Forbidden City and getting involved in
the critical moments of grand historical events in China, although this chivalric manifestation is
fictional and fabricated emplotment, and Beijing appears as a phantom in the paper world of literary
imagination rather than as a tangible or accessible material place. In The Book and the Sword, Master
Yu, Chen's mentor, breaks into the Forbidden City, meets with the Emperor Qianlong for two hours,
reveals the secret that the Emperor Qianlong is Chinese, and urges Qianlong to overthrow the Manchus and restore the throne of China to the Chinese while remaining as emperor himself (2004: 85,
231). In The Sword Stained with Royal Blood, Yuan ventures accidentally into Princess Changping's
palace, meets and talks with the Emperor Chongzhen, reveals his identity as the son of the wronged
and framed Yuan Chonghuan, and witnesses the decline of the Ming Empire. In The Deer and the
Cauldron, Wei lives and grows in the Forbidden City, situated amid court politics, martial arts
assassinations, sexual affairs with imperial princess, and the ongoing alliances and grudges between
Han people and Manchu rulers, which connect and displace the complex colonial situation in Hong
Kong.
Richard Hughes decribes Hong Kong and its many faces as a "borrowed place" and "borrowed
time." If Cold War Hong Kong lives on "borrowed time," then Jin's chivalric Beijing romance borrows
time—premodern Manchu sagas and Chinese legends—and on "borrowed time" reconstructs a
collective memory and imagined history for Hong Kong and Sinophone readers and audiences. If Hong
Kong is a "borrowed place," a city on lease from China to Britain for ninety-nine years, then Jin's
chivalric topography borrows spaces—the vast Chinese lands from the center to the peripheries—and
situates factual and fictional literary spaces in the "borrowed place," or more precisely, not to rent
Hong Kong but to reverse its status as a British colony by virtue of imagined chivalric intervention in
the imperial capital, the Forbidden City, the frontiers and borders, and the adjacent foreign territories;
to claim an imagined takeover of the Central Plains, the ethnic regions, and the areas occupied by
foreign powers. Wang coins the term "post-loyalism" to detect and diagnose the poetics and politics of
disenchantment and enchantment, memory and amnesia, hometown and foreign land, and argues
that "If loyalist consciousness always implies the disappearance and dislocation of time and space,
substitution and evolution, then post-loyalist consciousness further intensifies the trend, would rather
displace the dislocated time and space, remember and reflect an orthodoxy that may never have been
orthodox" ("Post-loyalist" 6). With regard to political orthodoxy, Han and non-Han gratitude and revenge, the loss and gain of romantic love, Chen's vacillation and melancholia, Yuan's hesitation about
assassination, and Wei's hybrid identification and multiparty negotiations exemplify the dislocation and
relocation of post-loyalist mentality/identity, as well as the ambivalence and ambiguity of post-loyalist
narration and representation in Jin's martial arts fantasy. In light of home and exile, the remote Islamic district in Western Regions, the overseas kingdom Brunei in Southeast Asia, the unknown hiding
place in Qing Yangzhou City, all suggest that post-loyalist positions cannot be predicted, traced,
navigated, or confirmed. The post-loyalist specter wanders in Jin's Cold War Hong Kong Sinophone
chivalric topography of imperial Beijing, which invokes the city's dramatic past in the Ming-Qing
dynastic crisis and transformation, dislocates the already displaced time and space, performs the ritual
of evocation and resurrection, reappears in the British colony, and travels in and haunts the
Sinophone world.
In conclusion, by emplotting political, ethnic, and cultural crises in the Ming-Qing dynastic transitions, Jin explores a wide range of topics, including gratitude and revenge between Han and non-Han
peoples, loyalty and betrayal, and imagined cultural memory against the great backdrop of the 1949
Chinese division and migrations that reshaped the Sinophone world. And by intertwining martial intervention and escapist hermitage, historical rewriting and martial arts fantasy, Jin inscribes the "postloyalist" ethos and emotional attachment into the imagery of Beijing as the imperial capital, as well as
that of Hong Kong as the colony at the imperial margin. In his chivalric topography produced in the interstices of the British colony and the two antagonist regimes across the Taiwan Strait, he creates an
Weijie Song, "Positions of Sinophone Representation in Jin's (金庸) Chivalric Topography "
CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture 17.1 (2015): <http://docs.lib.purdue.edu/clcweb/vol17/iss1/11>
Thematic Issue The Study of Chinese Literature in the Anglophone World. Ed. Shunqing Cao
page 8 of 8
ambiguous yet flexible identity to respond to the included/excluded zone of contact between the center and the margin, Chinese and non-Chinese, literature and history in modern Sinophone articulations.
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Author's profile: Weijie Song teaches modern Chinese literature, film, and culture at Rutgers University. His interests in scholarship include modern and contemporary Chinese literature and film, urban imagination, martial arts
narratives, Chinese popular culture, comparative imagology, and Sinophone and diaspora studies. In addition to
numerous articles, his book publications include Mapping Modern Beijing: Space, Emotion, and Literary Topography
(2016), 從娛樂行為到烏托邦衝動：金庸小說再解讀 (From Entertainment Activity to Utopian Impulse: Rereading Yong
Jin's Martial Arts Fiction) (1999), and 中國— 文學— 美國：美國小說戲劇中的中國形象 (China, Literature, and the United
States: Images of China in American and Chinese American Novels and Drama) (2003).
E-mail: <[email protected]>